Technology and the Soul: From the Nuclear Bomb to the World Wide Web, Volume 2 [Hardcover]

C. G. Jung famously declared that it is not the psyche that is in us, but rather we who are in the psyche. Updating this insight, the second volume of Wolfgang Giegerichs Collected English Papers examines what must be regarded as the most all-encompassing presence of our lives today: technological civilization. Living within technology, we now find that what we had formerly regarded as psychological phenomenaour feelings and emotions, images and dreamshave been superseded by phenomena bearing the predicates artificial, manufactured, and virtual. Television, the World Wide Web, and the nuclear bomb are cases in point. Far from being mere things among things, each of these has transformed the whole of mans world-relation. Though deplored by many as soulless on this account, these phenomena, it may be argued, are the real gods, the real archetypes, of the soul today. Psychologically it is not what we think and feel about them that counts, but what they think, what they feel.

Acknowledgments. Sources and Abbreviations. Introduction: The Object of Psychology. PART I: THE NUCLEAR BOMB PAPERS. 1. Saving the Nuclear Bomb. 2. The Nuclear Bomb as a Psychological Reality. 3. The Significance of Our Nuclear Predicament for Analytical Psychology and of Analytical Psychology for Our Nuclear Predicament. 4. The Nuclear Bomb and the Fate of God: On the First Nuclear Fission. 5. The Invention of Explosive Power and the Blueprint of the Bomb: A Chapter in the Imaginal Pre-History of Our Nuclear Predicament. 6. The Rocket and the Launching Base, or The Leap from the Imaginal into the Outer Space Named Reality . 7. The Fabrication of Time. PART II: TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION AND MEDIAL MODERNITY. 8. The Burial of the Soul in Technological Civilization. 9. The Occidental Souls Self-Immurement in Platos Cave. 10. The Function of Television and the Souls Predicament. 11. The World Wide Web From the Point of View of the Souls Logical Life. Coda:l3*